My Nonprofit Reviews

I volunteered during a China-Cal internship December 2011. This is a smaller-scale organization that is doing great work in very-rural China, serving a population that would otherwise never have access to professional medical evaluation or expertise to this degree. During the internship, the volunteer teams travel to various rural towns and villages to provide school children with screening for congenital heart disease. Those screened to have concerning murmurs are provided a more in-depth physical examination and echocardiogram by the physician team leaders, and those with intervenable congenital heart disease are sent (often with invaluable financial support from China-Cal) to larger medical centers in Kunming to be definitively treated. Volunteers in the program act as physician extenders of the teams, doing the bulk of school-child screening by auscultation, and organizing, taking histories and vital signs for free clinics. In this vein, the bulk of the volunteer work performed is most suited to pre-medical undergraduates, or pre-clinical medical students, though I was a medical resident and still gained enormously from the incredible pathology that is seen (unlike what you often see in the US) and the ability to work with this underserved population. The patients welcome any and all help and there is abundant medical pathology to be seen, so for the interested and engaged, you get out of it what you put in.

The "donation' that volunteers are asked to give goes toward paying for the screening expeditions, the financial support provided to patients to obtain definitive treatment, and the medications and equipment for free clinics. To maximize the amount of this donation that can go to serve the patients, which is the mission of the organization, volunteers are asked to also pay for their "on-the-ground" costs during the trip. The sometimes very rural nature of the villages served and the unpredictability of the itinerary (subject to the sometimes last minute requests of local government officials) can result in unforseen delays in transportation or lodging, which I imagine explains some of the negative reviews here. But this is to be expected when doing volunteer work on-the-ground in rural regions of a developing country. Overall, China-cal does a great job of organizing the volunteer trips, finding safe and comfortable housing and providing safe and adequate food, all in portions of southwestern China that few if any Westerners ever have the opportunity to set foot in, much less make a lasting impact.

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